When two callers are engaging in a conversation on the phone, the conversation flow comprises of a series of periods of presence of speech and periods of absence of speech. During the absence of speech periods, comfort noise that mimics the normal background noise of the phone call is typically introduced to maintain a natural conversation flow between the two callers. The comfort noise is typically a low level artificially created noise. If comfort noise is not used, a caller may think that the other party may have been disconnected due to complete silence, or “dead air”, during the absence of speech periods. Although the insertion of comfort noise facilitates the communication experience in quiet environments where the background noise or the telephone line noise are low or negligible, this comfort noise can become very unpleasant and even reduce speech intelligibility in a noisy environments where the background noise or the telephone line noise is high. In a high background noise or telephone line noise environment, if the background noise abruptly disappears due to the insertion of comfort noise to replace the absence of speech periods, the switching between presence of speech periods with high level background noise and absence of speech periods with low level comfort noise can actually impair natural conversations.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus for dynamically providing comfort noise in a packet network, e.g., a VoIP network.